By Paul Fitzgerald
Paul Lafrance is a household name and yet still many of us don’t really know his rise-to-fame-story.
However, HOSS Magazine, one of North America’s leading home lifestyle magazines, has just changed all that.
You see, the star of HGTV’s Decked Out, Disaster Decks, Custom Built and Deck Wars, has landed on the cover of the popular magazine’s spring issue that just hit the newsstands across Canada the United States.
Lafrance, who is widely known for creating detailed, personalized – and sometimes eccentric – outdoor living spaces, has quite the story to tell on his long road to success.
Growing up in Mississauga, ON, Lafrance struggled in school as he was not able to focus on courses that did not interest him. He says his only passions as a teenager were music, lego and people. He dropped out of high school at age 18.
Lafrance admits he was a self-described “weird little kid.”
“I always had to question everything,” he says in the feature story. “The discovery of the whole ADD thing when I was 35 was a revelation. It explained so much.”
However, Lafrance has instead diagnosed himself with IDD – Ideas Deficit Disorder.
He says it’s like having ADD, but it works in reverse. So, if something doesn’t interest or challenge him, he can’t even think about it. But when something does interest him, he brings a razor-sharp, exhaustive focus to it.
At the age of 20 his main outlet was playing guitar and working at the Toronto Christian Fellowship bookstore. This is where he met his wife of 20 years, Janna. They have been happily married since they first met and have four daughters.
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His moment of calling came when a friend who owned a fence and decking company offered him a job. While Lafrance admits that fence building was boring, his whole life changed when he was asked to build a deck. Yes, the rest is history.
Not long after he discovered the power and importance of outdoor spaces in people’s lives, he launched his own design company, Lafrance Design (now Paul Lafrance Design).
His business experienced many ups and downs, but that all changed in 2008 when City TV’s Breakfast Television called and asked him to take part in their 24-hour makeover of a rundown home. Lafrance was asked to tackle the front porch.
“So I go and do something really dramatic in 12 hours,” he recalls, “like slate diamond inlay.”
Sure enough when the BT crew arrived, reporter Jennifer Valentyne could not help but notice Lafrance learning against the porch in his stylish leather jacket and so she interviewed him. Documentary director producer Mike Sheerin watched the segment and like what he saw. Sheerin ended up creating Architect Films, which now produces Decked Out and Deck Wars.
“He (Sheerin) phones my assistant and a week later we’re out having coffee,” says Lafrance. “A little time after that Decked Out was born.”
These days when Lafrance is not busy taping one of his hit TV shows, he spends time working on creating another album with his band, working on a book (tentatively titled I Don’t Want to be An Adult Anymore), launching a furniture line, helping his wife as she pens her own Warriors series, and helping create L’Artisan, a studio opening this spring for local visual artists to showcase their works.
So, how does Lafrance manage to juggle so much? “I don’t sleep,” he says. “But I am never bored.”
